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What could be simpler, an iPhone app that let's you vote on poll questions formulated by your friends? Nothing to it, right?

Actually, there's a tremendous amount of smart thinking under the hood, off the screen and on the web to make this little nothing a pleasure to play with. The app in question, Polar, is the first product from a new company, Input Factory Inc., that is the collaboration of mobile designer/developer Luke Wroblewski and Jeff Cole, CTO & Co-Founder of PatientsLikeMe.

So what makes this app so delightful? To start, Wroblewski and Cole have an underlying philosophy that inform their design decisions. "We believe lots of little, simple interactions on mobile devices can add up to a lot of value," Wroblewski wrote to me. "We designed Polar to be fast, so you can make and vote on polls instantly… Fun, so you'll actually get in and share your opinions, repeatedly… and visual, because people love images—it makes voting entertaining, emotional, and distinct."

The partners are also combating what they consider a prejudice in the world of apps, "While many technologists dismiss mobiles as content consumption devices, we think they are great for creation as well."

This being said, it is creation on a very limited, bite-sized scale. But for anyone whose tween daughter has gotten hung up on the Coke or Pepsi books or for any guy enamored with those Men's Health Eat This Not, That books, you will immediately see the appeal of Polar. There is something mildly addictive about simple, binary choices. And a big part of the design strategy for the app is to retain that simplicity.

It's also clear that this is an app for grownups. This is where Wroblewski's cool but humorous design style comes in. The use of a triple pun could be cloying in a less sophisticated execution, but here, the fact that the app is about polls between polar opposite choices and that the logo (and mascot) for the design is a polar bear is smile (not groan) inducing.

The other smile inducer is the accumulation of small design details that create pleasure. Take, for instance, the common design pattern of "pull to refresh." In most apps, there's some kind of arrow and (patented!) rubber band easing and perhaps a little pop sound when you pull down from the top of the screen to update content. But in polar you get all that, plus a bonus: one, no two, hapless polar bears hanging from that hidden upper screen area (see images below.)

Another, more practical detail, involves how features appear just when you need them and disappear when you don't. An example of this kind of "just in time action," is on the create screen for a poll. As soon as you tap the input area for the headline, the keyboard comes up from the bottom of the screen and a little keyboard icon comes down to where your profile picture usually is. To hide the keyboard to see what your poll question is looking like (before you're done), you can tap the keyboard icon and it and the keyboard will retract (see image below.)

There are simple things, like the decision to not hide your password as you type it in (research shows less errors, higher satisfaction and no negative security consequences), but also methods to keep users logged in by default, reducing the need for bothersome logins.

More involved are the techniques described in Wroblewski's post, "Linking Mobile Web & Native App Experiences." Here, he describes how the app is set up with cookies so that if you respond to a poll on a desktop computer, you go to the web app page, but if you are on an iOS device (and have the app installed) your browser will recognize this and open the poll inside of the native app for a more fully featured experience. This matter of making web apps and native apps work together is a very important topic in mobile development, and Polar handles it with finesse.

Also wonderfully intuitive is the tools for bringing images into the polls. If you look at a buch of the poll questions (see note below for a cheating way to do this!) you will notice that the visuals are uncommonly good. Part of that is that the early adopters are Wroblewski's designer friends, but the more substantive part is that it's really easy to find or take and then position and crop images in Polar.

In today's post, One Thumb, One Eyeball Mobile Use, Wroblewski takes on performance, a subject of the utmost importance for the adoption of mobile apps. As Instagram and others that have mastered the form have shown, relentlessly removing performance obstacles is a key to increasing user satisfaction. "Designing for this reality of mobile use requires a laser-like focus on speed and simplicity. But how do you know if you're hitting the mark with a design? Timed, one-handed tests are one way to tell" he writes. "The core tasks in Polar are voting on and creating photo polls. So these are the interactions we timed and tested with one-handed use. Our goal was to allow anyone to vote on 10 polls or to create a new poll in under sixty seconds using only one thumb. As you can see in the video above, we were able to do just that. In fact, we're often closer to the thirty second mark." If typing with one thumb is too challenging, you can even use voice input exclusively to create a poll. See the video below to see how fun, fast and easy Polar is in use.

Does all of this assure that Polar will be a big hit? No, there are no sure things in the hyper-saturated world of mobile apps. But making fun experiences and removing the impediments to their enjoyment certainly helps to keep an app on users' home screens. For Polar, I think fleshing out the destination website where you can make, find and answer poll questions would help make it an "any screen available" pastime. [Until then, you can cheat and enter this url: polarb.com/polls/3976. You can substitute any number from 0001 to 3976 (and climbing) to see and vote on all of the polls that have been created with the app so far.] It's a promising start from a talented team, and I feel smarter just for knowing about these guys.